Phenomenal Contrast Arguments: What they Achieve

Phenomenal contrast arguments (PCAs) are normally employed as arguments showing that a certain mental feature contributes to (the phenomenal character of) experience, that certain contents are represented in experience and that kinds of sui generis phenomenologies such as cognitive phenomenology exist. In this paper we examine a neglected aspect of such arguments, i.e., the kind of mental episodes involved in them, and argue that this happens to be a crucial feature of the arguments. We use linguistic tools to determine the lexical aspect of verbs and verb phrases – the tests for a/telicity and for duration. We then suggest that all PCAs can show is the presence of a generic achievement-like phenomenology, especially in the cognitive domain, which contrasts with the role that PCAs are given in the literature

The Linguistic Determination of Conscious Thought Contents

In this paper we address the question of what determines the content of our conscious episodes of thinking, considering recent claims that phenomenal character individuates thought contents. We present one prominent way for defenders of phenomenal intentionality to develop that view and then examine ‘sensory inner speech views’, which provide an alternative way of accounting for thought-content determinacy. We argue that such views fare well with inner speech thinking but have problems accounting for unsymbolized thinking. Within this dialectic, we present an account of the nature of unsymbolized thinking that accords with and can be seen as a continuation of the activity of inner speech, while offering a way of explaining thought-content determinacy in terms of linguistic structures and representation

Commentary The Complexity of Intersectionality

Commentary to Leslie McCall's 2005 paper "The complexity of intersectionality", with a review of her main points and some critical remarks

Period doubling and reducibility in the quasi-periodically forced logistic map

We study the dynamics of the Forced Logistic Map in the cylinder. We compute a bifurcation diagram in terms of the dynamics of the attracting set. Different properties of the attracting set are considered, as the Lyapunov exponent and, in the case of having a periodic invariant curve, its period and its reducibility. This reveals that the parameter values for which the invariant curve doubles its period are contained in regions of the parameter space where the invariant curve is reducible. Then we present two additional studies to explain this fact. In first place we consider the images and the preimages of the critical set (the set where the derivative of the map w.r.t the non-periodic coordinate is equal to zero). Studying these sets we construct constrains in the parameter space for the reducibility of the invariant curve. In second place we consider the reducibility loss of the invariant curve as codimension one bifurcation and we study its interaction with the period doubling bifurcation. This reveals that, if the reducibility loss and the period doubling bifurcation curves meet, they do it in a tangent way